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Mr. Jain opened the door to see a man in dark sunglasses. He thought that Mr. Singh was likely from the FBI. Or even the CIA. Mr. Jain, after all, was a brown man and, in these suspicious times, was prone to the occasional bout of paranoia. But as the gentleman shuffled from foot to foot, Mr. Jain had time to consider the facts. An FBI agent would not show off his chest hair. He would not smell of so many perfumes. And he most certainly would not touch Mr. Jain’s feet and ask for his blessings.
“Specially prepared Jain meal, as requested by Mrs. Jain,” Mr. Singh announced.
“Really?” asked Mr. Jain. He was surprised but glad, for he was also beginning to feel hungry. “What is it?” he asked.
“A surprise.” Mr. Singh beamed. “Cooked according to the exacting instructions of Mrs. Jain.”
In addition to quadratic equations, exacting was a word Mr. Singh had learned in school. Now he felt particularly educated and wise and, while making small talk about the weather, felt confident enough to throw in a few words about global warming and El Niño.
Once blessedly alone again, Mr. Jain twisted open the casserole’s plastic cap. It came apart from the container with a sticky sound. The container itself was filled to the brim with an oily dark brown gravy. The curve of a tomato glistened in the soft rays of the afternoon light.
“Ooof,” said Mr. Jain. “The Punjabis and their oil. Just like . . .” He searched for an analogy. ”Just like Punjabis and their perfume.”
He wondered what surprise his wife had ordered for him. He stabbed into the curry with the plastic fork Mr. Singh had provided. He closed his eyes as the distinctive aroma of cumin overwhelmed his nostrils.
There was no crunch, as there would have been with broccoli or cauliflower. Instead, Mr. Jain chewed on something that was soft.
It was a kind of softness that Mr. Jain had never experienced in his life. No sooner had he chewed on one layer than a fresh softness emerged through another one that lay immediately beneath it. It wasn’t soft like a piece of copper or lead heated above its recrystallization temperature. Hot metals were bright, eager to change. This was a more unyielding kind of softness. It appeared almost resentful when asked to give way. Almost, thought Mr. Jain, as if it had once breathed . . .
During his moment of illumination in the Bhagavad Gita, the great warrior Arjuna had seen the countless eyes and countless mouths of Krishna.
The Buddha had felt a shaft of light illuminate the crown of his head underneath the pipal tree.
For Mr. Jain, the truth manifested itself as a strand of a dead animal wedged between his teeth.
Trembling with disbelief, Mr. Jain spat the curry into the sink. He then looked with dismay at the brown stains of shame there. He turned on both of the faucets. Water gushed forth and drilled with a great roar against the stainless-steel surface of the sink. But the sound of the water wasn’t loud enough to hush sixteen generations of ancestors and saints who reprimanded him in a stern and wordless silence.
Mr. Jain grabbed a sponge. He grasped the dishwashing detergent bottle by its neck and let out a generous stream of the gel. He scrubbed at the sink feverishly. After what seemed to be an entire lifetime, the sink returned to its unblemished state. The air was saturated with the scent of fresh lemons that the sticker on the detergent bottle promised.
Mr. Jain emptied the remaining contents of the food container into the plastic bag lining the trash can. By the time his thoughts caught up with his hands, he realized his error. The trash can contained junk mail and envelopes from utility bills that bore his name and address. These were clues that an inquisitive person, such as his building superintendent, or God, could use to tie the perpetrator to the crime. True, God might already know of his trespass, but there was every chance that He or She had been looking the other way at the moment of the bite. The ways of the Divine were mysterious.
Mr. Jain got down on his knees. Sorting through the muddy brown filth, he pulled out the envelopes and every other piece of paper that might bear his name. As the curry perverted his fingers and turned them a deeper shade of brown, Mr. Jain thought of the people who were forced to clean the toilets in India. Mr. Jain had always understood at an intellectual level the horrors of the caste system, but now he understood the injustices of the centuries-old evil sensually, more completely.
Mr. Jain got to his feet and cautiously carried the plastic trash bag down the hall to the incinerator chute. There was the clank of the door, a great whoosh, the receding sounds of descent, a loud bump, and, finally, a calming silence.
Mr. Jain spent the rest of the afternoon in a haze of repentance. At several moments he spoke aloud to himself. He was in the middle of a sentence when his wife entered the apartment. With a perfect understanding that can only be achieved after many years of marriage, both husband and wife ignored the awkward moment entirely and slipped into their household routines.
At seven in the evening Mr. Jain’s stomach rumbled, not with hunger but with guilt, if such a thing were even possible. He resolved to never eat again for the rest of his life. After all, rigorous penance could wash away the stains of even the greatest sin. Even the ten-headed demon Ravana had forced the gods to grant him a boon of invincibility through the force of sheer austerity. But Ravana did not have to contend with a sharp wife who had taught mathematics and was at ease with integral calculus.
“How was lunch?” asked Mrs. Jain.
“It was delicious.”
“Was it the cauliflower?”
Mr. Jain became suspicious. “Why would it be anything else?”
“I’m only asking,” said Mrs. Jain. “How did he make it? Indian style? Manchurian style?”
At that moment, Mr. Jain understood exactly how a person who has murdered another person and has just received a visit from the major crimes unit on Law & Order must feel.
“Manchurian. Schezuan. Chinese. Indian. Nothing like Asian cuisine,” he said vaguely.
He turned on the TV and increased its volume until the voice of Larry King filled their entire apartment.
“Turn that down,” said Mrs. Jain. “What’s the matter with you? Are you going deaf in your old age? Why, just the other day . . .”
Mr. Jain felt thankful to Larry King for having shifted the focus of the current conversation from the matter of the lunch toward one of Mr. Jain’s other failings. As his wife continued to pontificate, Mr. Jain walked to a window. Like most New Yorkers who chance upon a celestial object through the blockades of the city’s skyscrapers and light pollution, he was surprised to see the full moon.
He followed the contours of its round body with his eyes. It seemed perfectly still and content, as though it were above a city where no one had sinned, a city where all the animals were in a perfect state of health. It exhaled gently, and a puff of moonlight dribbled out into the sky.
Later that night, Mr. Jain felt his head sink into his pillow. How soft it was! He found it amazing that he had never paid attention to such a simple yet exquisite delight before. He moved his eyes to a curtain that billowed gently in a puff of steam given out by the radiator. Billowed. When was the last time he had used that word? But it seemed especially appropriate for this occasion, when the entire world seemed enveloped by a misty veil that softened edges and dimmed sounds, even muffling the clanging of the garbage truck and the accompanying shouts with New Jersey accents.
His wife moved in her sleep. The rustling of the cotton sheets eased him further into his thoughts. He touched her fleetingly on her back. The feeling of being enveloped in a world of softness deepened. Everything and everyone seemed to be covered by the moonlight from all those hours ago. Mr. Jain's mind was carried by the gentle breath of the moon into the past, to when they were young. He felt the curve of his wife’s body, the arch of her neck. He opened his mouth. He chewed on the fresh air that seemed to have come in through the window. It was soft, soft, almost as soft as the . .
.
When he woke up, he felt embarrassed. He was unable to look into his wife’s eyes or, for that matter, his reflection in the stainless steel sink.
“I need to say my prayers,” he told his wife.
“You should say your prayers after your shower,” she said. “If the building management shuts off the hot water as they have been doing lately, even God won’t be able to help you.”
But Mr. Jain did not need the comfort that a hot shower brings to a winter body. He needed the solace that is brought about by the admission of guilt to the Tirthankaras.
He put in a cassette on the teachings of Jainism delivered by Pandit Shri Bharilji. Mr. Jain felt glad that he hadn’t thrown away the tape player. He would never digitize these recordings of the talks delivered at the SIES College in Bombay. The whirring sound of the player’s motor lent the recordings an old-world quality and imbued them with an aura of timelessness.
The Pandit began his lecture with a quote about the importance of being watchful so as not to inflict harm on any living being. He quoted first in Hindi and then more slowly in English from the Shree Mahavir Aarti:
Dayadharm Ka Jhanda/Jag Mein Lahraya.
The flag of nonviolence/You unfurled in the world.
How censorious the Pandit sounded today! Mr. Jain began to apologize to the Pandit. But he felt his mind start to wander as soon as the Pandit moved on to speak about rebirth. Mr. Jain nodded as the Pandit pointed out that death hastened one toward moksha, where a man is freed of earthly encumbrances and delivered into a universe of salvation and bliss.
Had Mr. Jain done the goat a favor by being indirectly responsible for its death? On earth, the animal had probably been leading a miserable existence, tied to a rope or locked in a pen. But now the goat was likely witnessing entire galaxies and discovering great metaphysical insights.
Mr. Jain began to sense ambivalence in the Pandit’s teachings. He felt confused and helpless.
He knew that eating any more animals would be a direct affront to the teachings of the Mahavira, the twenty-fourth and the greatest of the Tirthankaras. But he also clearly had a realization whose essence he had been fighting ever since he had seen that soft puff of moonlight.
He was going to eat more meat.
Procuring more meat would not be a simple task. In a neighborhood like Jackson Heights, where there were at least five Indians per square inch, it would be impossible for a respectable Jain to order meat at a public restaurant. Tongues would be clucked. Judgments would be passed. A scandal would ensue.
He decided to go for a walk. It was cold and wintry outside, but Mr. Jain could not recall a single instance in his life when a walk hadn’t shed light on a particularly vexing problem.
On Northern Boulevard, he saw a large American flag above the door of a diner. Mr. Jain scoffed as he read the words The Land of the Free. For many Indians, Jackson Heights was hardly the land of the free.
Mr. Jain wished that, instead of Jackson Heights, he were in Jackson, Mississippi. There, no one would know what a person of the Jain religion was. There, no one would think twice before serving him a few pieces of meat. It was Jackson, Mississippi, and not Jackson Heights that was the land of the free.
His shoes slid on a patch of ice on 37th Avenue. Mr. Jain recovered his footing. He continued walking blindly with flakes of snow swirling before his eyes.
“Some weather we are having, huh?”
Mr. Jain smiled uneasily. He recognized the Muslim gentleman from the train station.
A month or so ago, this man with a prominent skullcap had asked Mr. Jain for directions to a particularly esoteric section of Brooklyn. Mr. Jain had been overcome with sympathy. How badly the Muslims were being treated after 9/11! In the South, a bus station attendant had turned a Muslim man away from a water fountain. In Massachusetts, a group of fraternity boys had beaten a Muslim pizza delivery boy to death. But Mr. Jain would not be like the others. He would be kind to Muslims. He had supplied the man with directions. Having performed this act of kindness, he had passed through the turnstile.
The man had caught up with Mr. Jain at the subway platform. Mr. Jain had greeted him politely with a nod of his head. The man must have felt encouraged, for he spoke again. At first, he had asked Mr. Jain if this was indeed the correct platform for the F train. He had then proceeded to ask Mr. Jain a far more difficult question. He had asked why there were so many gods in the world when it was clear to even the dimmest intellect that Allah was the only true God. Why were there so many infidels who insisted on worshipping other gods?
Mr. Jain had looked over his shoulder for the FBI agents who were undoubtedly on their way. To get away from the man, he had jumped into the first train that arrived at the platform. He’d sighed with exasperation as he realized that he had boarded the R train. Even Allah would admit that a journey on the screechingly slow R train was too harsh a punishment for the most heinous of the infidels.
Now, Mr. Jain thought that it was remarkable that he should run into this man again. He found it even more incredible that the man should remember him after so many weeks.
“Some weather indeed,” he replied politely. “It shouldn’t snow this much in November.”
“Would you like to come into my store?”
Mr. Jain was caught up in a flurry of unclear thoughts, through which shone a faint but obvious light of illumination. He couldn’t refuse the man his simple request. If he did so, he risked appearing like the bus station attendant who had refused a Muslim a drink from a fountain, perhaps even as callous as the group that had murdered the pizza boy. After all, being at the receiving end of an unkind action caused one to lose faith in humanity, which was but the first step that led to the taking of another human’s life.
There was a pervasive smell of incense in the store. An orange flower shone brightly from the top of the counter. It was almost as orange as the jumpsuits that the inmates wore in Guantanamo Bay. The green cover of a Koran, a prayer mat with exquisite floral patterns, signs written with the confident strokes of Arabic lettering—each of these distinct sights overwhelmed Mr. Jain’s mind in a single emotion of fear, so much so that he was soon incapable of discerning individual objects, unique things.
“Would you like to buy something?”
“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Jain, eager to take recourse to any action that would hasten his exit from the store. “I will take that.”
The man looked to where he pointed.
“A burka?” He rubbed his palms together. “Excellent. Excellent. There’s nothing like a burka to keep beautiful the jewel of the house.”
Mr. Jain smiled uneasily. He contemplated what his wife would do if he insisted that she wear such an all-enveloping garment. As he realized the answer, the fog of confusion lifted, and Mr. Jain experienced his first lucid thought since entering the store.
She would kill him.
Mr. Jain paid the approving store owner for his purchase. He scanned the heavens for the helicopters that always seemed to arrive at the scene of an anti-terrorism raid. But save for a black crow that had decided to brave the snow, there was nothing in the sky. The icy wind clasped tightly at his face with its cruel and thin fingers. Mr. Jain felt victimized, as though he had been singled out by the winter and indeed the entire world for harsh treatment.
A patrol car moved slowly down the avenue. It passed Mr. Jain and, picking up speed, disappeared with a loud screech around the corner. Mr. Jain felt relieved. He also felt slightly unsafe. He couldn’t help thinking that if the NYPD had its act together, if they were truly acting on every suspicious development, he would at this very moment be surrounded by a posse of policemen.
But this was no time to be thinking of matters related to national security. It was a time to be thinking of individual security. Mr. Jain had recently read of black sites, secret prisons that the government operated in countries like Poland and Romania. Poland was cold. Mr. Jain shivered as he thought about h
ow chilly their secret prisons would be. He decided to go home and dispose of the incriminating evidence. He had to put a safe distance between himself and the burka.
Just yesterday, he had combed through the leftovers of the goat carefully, removed all the clues that could link him to its murder, and disposed of the remains in the trash. Today, he was about to take a burka back to his apartment and dispose of it in the trash. In the newspapers and the movies, criminals were often portrayed as glamorous individuals who stayed in glitzy condominiums and walked around with flashy models. But the truth of the matter was that, in the real world, criminals had to spend a disproportionate amount of time next to a trash chute.
Mr. Jain rushed toward his apartment, never slowing down even as his feet slipped on the thin sheet of ice that had formed along the length of 73rd Street. Once inside the building’s elevator, he stabbed the door close button. Shocked at his rudeness as she approached the elevator, Mrs. Gomez, his neighbor of fourteen years, gasped with disbelief.
Mr. Jain grunted with relief. He could not afford to be with anyone else in the elevator, the dimensions of which were eerily similar to those of an interrogation room.
As the elevator hurtled to its destination, Mr. Jain realized that his wife would probably have gone to Mrs. Chang’s. The apartment would be a chamber of solitude. As soon as he entered the foyer, Mr. Jain acted with the recklessness of one who knows that he is alone and not under observation. He flung the bag containing the burka onto a chair and plopped heavily into the couch.
He closed his eyes and took solace in the first moment of comforting darkness.
The steam heater rattled and hissed. Mr. Jain felt the lobe of his right ear glow with its warmth. His breathing returned to normal. A dog barked outside. Mr. Jain’s mind latched on to the familiar and comforting sound. By the time the dog had run down the street and its barking had faded, Mr. Jain felt like himself. He felt like a scientific man with an inquisitive mind.
He began to wonder just how a woman would feel when she was under the burka. He had read recently about some politician who had pointed out that having to wear a burka was a violation of liberty at the most fundamental level. Using words that had left an impression on Mr. Jain’s mind, the politician had said that while she was under a burka, a woman could not even eat an ice cream cone.
On the other hand, his wife’s friend Mrs. Islam had once told him that that every woman, at least in America, had the right to choose to wear, or not to wear, the burka.
“I wear it,” she had told Mr. Jain, “because I choose to. It makes me feel safer in this neighborhood. It gives me privacy. And because it is something I choose to do, it empowers me.”
Mr. Jain decided to investigate further. He pulled out the burka cautiously from the plastic bag. It was black. Mr. Jain, who had seen plenty of youngsters make their way toward nightclubs, thought that it was a very New York color. The word hip came to his mind. He held the garment in his hands and found that it was heavy and layered. He had to unfold it at least seven times before he could see it stretched at full length.
This burka didn’t have the permissive window around the face that was prominent among those of the Muslim women back home in Bombay. There was a small mesh rectangle around the eyes, but it was tiny and narrow. There was a flap that one could turn upward to uncover one’s face. But that was all. Could a woman gaze upon all that was going on in the world through such a small portal? Mr. Jain decided to see for himself. He allowed the burka to fall over his body.
At first, he experienced an absolute darkness. Then his eyes adjusted to the reduced light, and he was able to see. Mr. Jain took a few steps into the foyer. He tripped and recovered his footing. His confidence grew after he had taken a few more strides. He made a bold left turn into the kitchen.
Far from being trapped, he felt liberated. This was a garment that gave a man (a woman, a woman, he had to remind himself) the ability to be completely hidden from the world. At the same time, he (she, she, he had to remind himself again) could do absolutely anything unseen. She could pick her nose. Scratch her torso. She might not be able to eat an ice cream cone, but she could secretly eat meat. At the very least, she could easily buy meat in broad daylight without fearing that she would be recognized and judged.
And as long as he was under the burka, so could he.
Mr. Jain tried to recall the words of Pandit Shri Bharilji to calm his fevered mind. But then he thought about the goat’s softness. He recollected the touch of his wife’s back and the gentle puff of the misty moonlight.
The Pandit did not stand a chance. Mr. Jain had lost control over his thought processes. Just as a rolling stone has no choice but to go to the bottom of a mountain, Mr. Jain’s actions were now tinged with inevitability. He was going to have to eat meat again.
A small step took him out of his apartment. A few more took him into the elevator, out of it, and outside his building. He now knew how Neil Armstrong must have felt on the moon, each small movement momentous all by itself and propelling him forward into a world of adventure.
He crossed the street, intoxicated with the pleasure of the meat that was so close, so very close. Inside the burka, his feet moved quickly but awkwardly, like the slurred words of a drunken man.
As he turned onto the avenue, he felt something push hard at him on his left side. His shocked body shut down in an instant, like a supercomputer in the first stages of malfunction. But then he began to see. He began to hear. He heard a man shout angry words from the window of a car.
Mr. Jain discerned that the car in the intersection had nudged him. Through his narrow field of vision, his eyes swam in the sea of blue that surrounded the Ford SUV’s logo.
“Hey, go back to your own country!” the man said. “Go the hell home if you don’t even know how to cross a street here!”
Mr. Jain was nervous. At this very moment, he was likely being observed by everybody on the street. Yet he couldn’t see even one person in his immediate field of vision.
To Mr. Jain’s credit, he remembered that he was playing the role of a woman.
“I am sorry. I am sorry,” he said in a high-pitched falsetto. He thought he sounded like a woman.
“Are you OK, madam?” A man came close to Mr. Jain and touched him on the shoulder.
“Don’t touch me!” he shrieked. “Or else I will call the police!”
Those words were successful in clearing the crowd that had gathered. People began to walk away from Mr. Jain. A golden retriever poked its nose under the burka and lingered for a moment longer than was necessary, but it responded to the frantic tugs of its owner, and it, too, was gone.
Mr. Jain’s confidence grew with this minor accomplishment. He breathed deeply. He resisted the temptation to open the face flap so that he could see more clearly. As he had when he was a child of seven in Bombay, he looked with exaggerated care in both directions for oncoming traffic and finally crossed the street.
Mr. Jain sighed with relief at being alone. He walked to the corner of the next block and made a left. Here, he found new cars, new dogs, and new people. That was what he liked most about New York City. A man could go to a new block and start his entire life anew.
Mr. Jain reprimanded himself. It had been irresponsible of him to leave the apartment without conducting an extensive practice run with the burka. He had been right in supposing that the burka was a garment of invisibility, that it could be the robe of a superhero. He thought that Superman hadn’t simply walked out his door one day to fly around the world. He would have first conducted a few test spins around the block.
Mr. Jain thought of going back to the apartment. But, like many people who had endured a trial, he found that the experience had strengthened him. He felt ready to take on new adventures.
When Mr. Jain was first learning to drive, his teacher had told him that he should get behind a car that was going at the speed limit, then follow it at a safe distance. Mr. Jain now a
pplied that same principle to walking in a burka. He got behind an old lady who was pushing a cart and followed her at a safe distance. Unluckily for him, she didn’t walk all the way to the Nan Violence restaurant. Instead, she made a sharp left by a cardboard box covered with snow and disappeared into the cavernous interiors of the Patel Brothers grocery store.
Underneath the burka, Mr. Jain licked his lips. It was icy and wintry outside, but he tasted sweat. Mr. Jain wasn’t surprised. As he had told many a research employee over the flame of a Bunsen burner, “Success is 99 percent perspiration. . . .”
And he was close to achieving success.
Nan Violence was just a few steps down and across the street. Mr. Jain stood still and turned his head a full 180 degrees. This allowed him to get a panoramic view of his surroundings. He then walked forward like Mr. Neil Armstrong, one step at a time, his gaze alternating between the ice on the pavement and the person now directly in front of him.
He entered the restaurant. He was greeted by two pairs of eyes, one of which was Tibetan and the other distinctly Indian. Mr. Jain recognized the latter. They were those of the devil incarnate himself, the man who had given Mr. Jain that first push down the slope of sin. Mr. Jain had no doubt that the proprietor of Nan Violence was the devil. How else could any human make a curry like that in his buffet display shine with such an unnatural glow?
Mr. Singh beamed widely. “What would you like, madam?”
Mr. Jain was thankful for the reminder. He was now a lady. He pointed at the dish that he recognized so clearly in the display and spoke in a falsetto voice. “What animal is that?” he asked.
“Goat,” said Mr. Singh. Mr. Singh launched into a eulogy on both the quality of the meat and its exquisite preparation.
Mr. Jain ordered the goat dish to go. He immediately recited the words of the Shree Mahavir Aarti prayer internally and asked for the great saint’s forgiveness.
He sat down at a table as he waited for his takeout order. A lady of generous proportions gorged on a large piece of chicken at the next table. Mr. Jain marveled at how permissive her religion was. Unlike him, she could eat meat, and in public too. Unlike him, she could show her face freely in society, without having to hide it underneath a burka.
At the table next to him on the other side sat a timid-looking man with a thin mustache. A software engineer on a work visa, thought Mr. Jain. They always looked scared. They always sported thin mustaches. The man had worked his way through one plate of food from the buffet. He was probably contemplating if he could make another visit to the buffet with his unclean dish. Or wondering if he should he instead call for the waiter to take away the plate so that he could start anew. In either case, he would be making a public exhibition of his gluttony.
Mr. Jain recognized a mirror spirit in this software engineer. In a city where one fast- food restaurant had more than enough calories to feed its entire population, he and the mustached man were among the last few remaining sensitive souls for whom eating inappropriately was a source of shame and anxiety.
Mr. Singh drew in a whistle as Mr. Jain handed him a twenty-dollar bill. Who knew that Muslim women were so hairy? He felt sympathetic for his Muslim brethren. With all the attention bestowed upon them by the FBI and CIA, there was no relief for them in the outside world. And, judging by the hairy hands of this woman, they wouldn’t get much relief at home, either.
Mr. Jain slid the goat into the protective folds of his burka. He walked down the streets with a jaunty air. He felt full of the genuine confidence that comes from accomplishment, which is far greater than the confidence that comes from mere praise.
But he thought of his prior experience with Mr. Singh and stopped in his tracks. What if Mr. Singh had mixed up the order again? What if, instead of the goat, he had packed a cauliflower? It was best that Mr. Jain find out now. He could not envision making the treacherous walk from his apartment to the restaurant inside the dark confines of the burka again.
He turned to face the closed shutter of a deli. He opened the bag. He drew in his breath as he heard that familiar sound of the plastic lid unsticking itself from the container. It was difficult to see the contents of the vessel in the darkness of the burka. Mr. Jain lifted the flap of his burka to take a closer look at the cubes that were floating in the curry. Mr. Singh had not made a mistake.
Mr. Jain smiled, but only for an instant.
The shutter of the deli opened, and Mr. Jain found himself looking into the face of another man. He pulled the flap of the burka over his face and rushed out into the bustle of the street.
Mr. Rossi looked at the receding figure with great shock. His mouth opened in such a perfect O that he looked like a cliché from a cartoon. He experienced the paralysis that a normally sedentary man experiences after being suddenly thrown into the midst of adventure.
At the same time, he felt surprised and blessed, as though he had been handpicked for a very special mission, namely to protect America from the Muslims. And he hadn’t been handpicked by your average, hairy, human hands; he had been selected for this endeavor by the manicured and majestic hands of God himself.
Mr. Rossi had spent his career as a construction worker for the MTA. After retirement, he had settled into an easy routine that mostly involved drinking beer and gardening. One morning, he had opened the Queens Ledger and read with great dismay that Olive Garden had been voted the best Italian restaurant in Jackson Heights. Oh, how his beloved neighborhood had changed! Giglio’s, Bella Notte, Cascarelli’s . . . all these great establishments had been run out of business by those curry places, those Raj- somethings.
Mr. Rossi had resolved that he would bring great Italian food back to Jackson Heights. He took over a space that had been previously occupied by yet another Indian fast-food shop. He stocked it with antipasti, pastas, parmigianas, cannoli, espresso, Limoncello, and fresh sausage flown in all the way from Chicago. He then filled the deli with his three favorite sounds in the world: Italian music, New Jersey rock ’n’ roll, and the shrill pitch of his mother yelling at him.
If the tragic events of 9/11 hadn’t taken place, Mr. Rossi undoubtedly would have had a different reaction to seeing a man in a burka. He would have shrugged, smiled, and said, “Only in New York.” But 9/11 had happened. Those bastards had come to America and tried to destroy it. America had been changed forever. Americans had been changed forever.
Nowadays, one had to be ceaselessly watchful. One had to be brave. He would be brave. Mr. Rossi ran after Mr. Jain with no regard for the ice streaked treacherously along the ground.
“Hey, you!” he shouted.
Mr. Jain, who was your average, middle-class Jain, was inexperienced in matters of subterfuge. He stopped and turned around. He gasped with surprise as Mr. Rossi pulled open the flap of his burka. He stopped breathing as Mr. Rossi snapped a photo with a camera phone.
“Smile!” Mr. Rossi growled.
Mr. Jain now felt a modicum of his considerable powers of analytical reasoning return to him. He saw clearly that he did not need to smile. Instead, he needed to detach himself at once from the current situation. He turned his back on Mr. Rossi and began to run. Mr. Rossi followed him down the block at an impressive pace. But Mr. Jain, though older, had kept to a regimen of a long daily walk for the last twenty-five years and was easily able to outdistance the overweight deli owner.
Mr. Rossi stopped when he came across a patrolman on the corner of 73rd Street and 37th Avenue.
“Officer!” he gasped. “I have something really important here . . . something life changing.
Officer O’Hare frowned. He did not like the sound of “life changing.” He was a simple man who had joined the police force because he’d wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. He relished a steady, day-to-day, routine life that began with an egg on a roll and ended with a medium-rare cheeseburger. He thrived on predictability. He did not want to change his life or, for that matter, meet p
eople who wished to do so.
Mr. Rossi shoved his phone into the officer’s face.
“What’s this?” O’Hare grumbled.
“It’s a Muslim man.”
“So?”
“He’s wearing a burka!”
“And your point is . . .?”
“First, they came at us with their bombs. Then their planes. And now, they are cross- dressing!”
“Cross dressing in planes?” Officer O’Hare asked.
“No, cross-dressing on the open street. In broad daylight! They are out to corrupt the moral fabric of our society.”
Officer O’ Hare looked at Mr. Rossi with a blank stare.
“This is serious,” Mr. Rossi said. “Don’t you remember what our president said after that horrible day in September?”
Officer O’Hare tried to recollect just what was it that President Bush had said. But nothing more than “Go shopping” came to mind. But why should he remember anything that President Bush had said? He had stopped listening to Mr. Bush ever since the president had withdrawn the troops from Afghanistan and taken them into Iraq.
“He said that, as Americans, we now have to be extra watchful,” Mr. Rossi said.
“Yes,” said Officer O’Hare. “If you see something, say something.”
“I don’t think it was the president who said that,” said Mr. Rossi.
“Well, somebody did.”
Officer O’Hare found that he didn’t like the person in front of him. He looked away from Mr. Rossi and examined a snowflake on the sleeve of his uniform with great attention.
“I think we might be getting away from the point,” Mr. Rossi said. “We should be studying the photo of the man in the burka.”
“Let’s have a closer look, then,” Officer O’Hare said.
He held the camera phone close to his eyes. Then he stretched out his arm and studied the photo from afar. Those sparkling eyes. That thick mustache. He had seen that face before. He looked beyond the tensed features. He looked for the essence of that face. As a policeman, he knew that every face had one expression that never goes away, no matter the current emotional state of the person. It is the expression one wore most often, one that left an indelible imprint on a person’s countenance. George Bush always had a look of smug satisfaction. Shaquille O’Neal had the gentle smile. In this case, it was the look of quiet contentment that shone through the fear. Officer O’Hare recognized the man on the camera phone. He was Mr. Jain, the soft-spoken husband of his childhood math teacher.
Like Mr. Singh, Officer O’Hare was fond of Mrs. Jain. She had taught him the essentials of algebra and calculus without ever once raising her voice. In a society where people needed calculators to figure out tips and where politicians fooled the population with deceptive graphs, he felt happy that he was not innumerate. Armed with the simple workings of the Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics Mrs. Jain had taught him, he had become a more confident man.
“I will take care of this,” he said to Mr. Rossi.
“Take care of it, how?” asked Mr. Rossi. He put two fingers to his head and blew out crudely with his mouth to mimic the sound of a gun.
“I will take care of it,” repeated Officer O’Hare. “I will take it up with the proper authorities.”
“The FBI? The CIA? Homeland Security?” Mr. Rossi asked excitedly.
“There are . . . others,” Officer O’Hare said mysteriously.
Mr. Rossi was impressed. His fevered imagination flew to faraway lands with secret prisons and double-humped camels.
“You are a good man, Officer,” he said. “With people like you guarding America, we will remain the land of the free.”
Officer O’Hare felt a need to be free of this conversation. But he decided to take steps to protect Mr. Jain. If Mr. Rossi went around telling people what he had seen, Mr. Jain could be in danger. Nowadays, there was no shortage of vigilantes and paranoid law enforcement officials who might take immediate action to harm the old man.
“Thank you,” he said. “And take care that you don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. It’s top secret. You are now a privileged citizen helping the state.”
“Got it, Officer,” Mr. Rossi said. He clicked his heels together and promptly slipped on the pavement.
Officer O’Hare decided to check up on Mr. Jain first thing the next morning. He doubted that the old man was up to anything dangerous. So he liked to cross-dress as a Muslim woman. So what? People began to act more strangely as they got older. Why, Lady Gaga had once worn a dress made entirely of meat, and she wasn’t even old. All Mr. Jain had done was wear a burka.